About the book: 2024 / “My destiny is special and I myself am special,” wrote Lev Lvovich Tolstoy in 1915 in a letter to mother. The son of a great writer, he desperately sought to find his own voice, but had little success in this: during his lifetime, Lev Lvovich - writer, playwright, sculptor, journalist - could count on interest in himself primarily as Tolstoy the Younger. His own projects remained unrealized, his marriage to the Swede Dora Westerlund failed, and the 1917 revolution separated him from Russia forever. In his book, Ben Hellman reconstructs the complex and dramatic biography of Lev Lvovich, in which admiration for the West and Great Russian chauvinism, revolutions and wars, periods of abundance and extreme need, years of optimism and despair were present and coexisted. The author drew material from many sources, including Tolstoy Jr.’s correspondence with his father, his autobiography “The Experience of My Life,” and Pavel Tolstoy’s unpublished manuscript “The Life of Dora Tolstoy’s Mother,” partly based on Dora Westerlund’s letters to her parents in Sweden. Ben Hellman is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, author of the books “Fairy Tale and Reality. History of Russian Children's Literature" (2016) and "Northern Guests of Leo Tolstoy" (2021), published by the publishing house "NLO».